A few days in Geneva

The so-called ‘G5’ coun­tries (Aus­tralia, Brazil, EU, India and the USA) are meet­ing in Paris this week­end in an attempt to cut through their dif­fer­ences on agri­cul­tur­al trade rules, par­tic­u­lar­ly on mar­ket access. The African-Caribbean group (G-90) is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly meet­ing in Mau­ri­tius seek­ing, prob­a­bly, to con­sol­i­date their demand that any new agree­ment on agri­cul­ture should place no new oblig­a­tions on them.

The jet d’eau

Both groups head back to Gene­va at the start of the week, where I’m work­ing on anoth­er project (more lat­er) for a few days. Like many oth­ers, I’ll be fol­low­ing devel­op­ments in the Agri­cul­tur­al nego­ti­a­tions as close­ly as I can. By the end of the week, the Chair­man of the nego­ti­at­ing group on Agri­cul­ture will try to pro­duce the text of a ‘frame­work’ for future nego­ti­a­tions tak­ing account of the posi­tions laid out in Paris and Mau­ri­tius. Anoth­er Mis­sion impos­si­ble? The for­mer Direc­tor Gen­er­al of WTO, Peter Sutherland—now Chair­man of BP and Gold­man Sachs—has been issu­ing stern, and rather pompous, warn­ings of the con­se­quences should this attempt at a ‘frame­work’ not suc­ceed. Fail­ure to agree now—coming after the col­lapse of the Can­cún meeting—could dam­age the WTO per­ma­nent­ly, he wrote in the Finan­cial Times. His vision of the chaos that could fol­low is pecu­liar, to say the least, for a for­mer EU Com­mis­sion­er for Com­pe­ti­tion Pol­i­cy: bq. With­out a cred­i­ble mul­ti­lat­er­al sys­tem of rules, can we cope in an order­ly fash­ion with the relent­less com­pet­i­tive impact of Chi­na in the glob­al econ­o­my? (“Finan­cial Times”:http://www.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373591114&p=1012571727102) This is wild­ly off-beam and euro­cen­tric. But Suther­land believes that such ‘dan­gers’ war­rant the sub­mer­sion of sub­stan­tive dif­fer­ences on agri­cul­ture for the sake of main­tain­ing the process of the nego­ti­a­tions. bq. … all par­ties must think very seri­ous­ly indeed before reject­ing the chairman’s pro­pos­al [for a ‘frame­work’ on agri­cul­ture]. He will not get a sec­ond chance with­in the time avail­able. And if the agri­cul­tur­al frame­work can­not com­mand a con­sen­sus — albeit a reluc­tant con­sen­sus — no oth­er dossier will move.

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher